The Darkest Thread

by Jen Blood

  For seconds that felt like miles, I moved through the emptiness. The smell of damp earth and something rotting and long dead closed in around me. Once I’d cleared the opening, I stopped climbing and let them simply lower me, hanging suspended in the darkness.

  “Jamie?” Jack called down. “Everything all right?”

  “Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Give me another couple of feet—I can’t see the bottom yet.”

  I strained to hear anything in the pervasive darkness beneath me. There was nothing. I trained my headlamp below as I was lowered another foot. And another. Periodically, Jack, Wade, or McDonough would call down to make sure I was all right. I called back the same thing, again and again: “I’m fine—give me more rope.”

  The stench grew stronger the farther down I got. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough that I could see the stone walls of the old well around me, barely a foot away in all directions. Illuminated by the light from my headlamp, the stones told me no story; they were just stones, grown pale and smooth with age. Occasionally a bug would skitter across my path, trying to get away from the unearthly glow I’d brought with me, but I ignored them.

  There was something else down there, though—something I couldn’t exactly see, but I could feel its presence, feel it moving around me. Waiting for me, open-mawed, with red eyes and sharpened claws. My breath came harder, my chest tightening in the vice grip of panic. I forced myself to breathe evenly.

  “Jamie?” Jack called down.

  I couldn’t answer at first. I took a breath and held it for a second, then exhaled. They didn’t give me any more rope—I hung suspended, the bottom just a couple of feet from me now, and in my growing terror flailed enough to send myself careening into the side of the well.

  “Jamie!” Jack called again. “We can bring you back up—”

  “No!” I shouted, forcing the word from my mouth. “I’m fine. I’m almost there, just give me another two feet and I’ll hit the bottom.”

  They lowered me until I reached a foot of stagnant water that smelled as bad as any sewer. The water oozed into my boots, since I’d neglected to wear waders down here. I ignored the stench and the sensation and finally stood on my own two feet, grateful to feel the ground beneath me. Then, I looked around.

  And I wasn’t so grateful any longer.

  Around me, the walls closed in. I turned slowly, the headlamp casting its light on the stonework. The limestone was worn and dry, despite the dampness of the air. About midway through my 360-degree turn to examine the space, I paused. The light focused on a single spot, where three words were written in faded, rust-colored letters on the pale stone.

  GOD SAVE ME

  A chill ran through me. At the same time, my boot hit something in the shallow water at my feet.

  A scream rose up from the ground, so shrill it seemed more animal than human. I froze where I was. It echoed, unearthly, in the narrow confines of the well.

  “Jamie?” I heard Jack call down to me.

  “It’s not me,” I called back. My heart hammered in my chest until it seemed my ribcage couldn’t contain it much longer. “It wasn’t me. Hang on.”

  I looked around, desperate now. The scream had faded, but it still continued faintly—as though locked in the confines of the earth itself. There was a pause above me, a loaded stillness I could feel though I was thirty feet down and out of sight.

  “What wasn’t you?” Jack called to me. The scream rose again—shrill, ragged, filling my head until I thought my ears would bleed with the sound. Jack didn’t say anything, though, and now I knew why.

  He didn’t hear it.

  Only I could hear that scream.

  “I think I found something,” I called up again, forcing myself to focus beyond that shattering sound. “There’s writing on the stonework.” I bent down so my light was trained on the ground and ran a gloved hand through the muck at my feet.

  My fingers closed around a long, solid object beside my right foot. Before I pulled it from the mud, I knew what it was.

  “There’s human remains down here,” I called up at last. “I’ve got a femur here, and someone wrote on the wall of the well. They must have fallen in.”

  No one said the thing I was sure we were all thinking: How the hell does someone fall into a well that’s covered with a stone seal and buried beneath a foot of soil?

  The scream had faded at last, the remnant of the sound just the faintest vibration in the earth beneath my feet. Bear is the only other person I’ve met who can hear those cries of the dead the way I can. I wonder sometimes if the dogs can, particularly Phantom, but…well, she’s a dog. I can’t exactly ask her. But there are times when I hear something and Phantom will stop at the same time, head cocked, ears pricked, as though whatever parallel world the spirits walk is clear to her, as well.

  “I take it whoever was down there wasn’t down there recently,” McDonough called.

  I looked at the femur in my hand. It was impossible to tell whether it had belonged to male or female, child or adult—or at least it was impossible for me. An expert would probably have better luck. The one thing that was clear, however, was that the bone had been here much more than just a few days.

  “No,” I said. “The bone’s clean. It can’t belong to Ariel.”

  Which begged the question: what had the dogs alerted to here? Though some of the dogs had been cross trained, few were actually cadaver dogs. They were looking for one specific individual: Ariel Redfield. So why were they all alerting above this well?

  “Come on back up,” McDonough called down. “We’ll send a crime scene tech down to recover the rest of the remains, just leave everything as you found it.”

  I lay the bone back down in the water and grabbed the harness that still hung suspended above me. After I fastened myself in, I tugged on the rope and they began to pull me up.

  I’d barely gone five feet before the screams began again. They sounded closer this time—as though whatever barrier had separated us before was thinner now.

  I tried to keep my focus, work past the paralyzing fear the sound inspired. I’ve been hearing the cries and the laughter and the whispered words of the dead for the better part of my life; since eight years old, they have been a reality for me.

  “Quiet,” I whispered into the air, hoping Jack and McDonough couldn’t hear me. “Screaming does you no good… Tell me what you want me to know.”

  Instead of quieting, though, the scream escalated until it reached a fever pitch, no thin membrane left to separate that world from my own. A headache rang in my temples. I tugged on the rope, shouting over the disturbance inside my own head.

  “Stop!” I called. “Wait a second.”

  Abruptly, my ascent was halted.

  I hung in midair once more, and rocked myself until I came into contact with the limestone wall. I clung to the rough surface, bare fingers scrabbling against the stone as I twisted to give myself a better view of the walls around me. The scream continued, a sustained wail that I prayed would end before I went mad.

  And then, I saw it.

  My light shone on a circle in the stonework, perhaps three feet across.

  I inched closer.

  “There’s a tunnel!” I called up. “It looks like it goes on for a while—it’s about ten feet off the ground here.”

  I thought again of the number of times the dogs had alerted throughout the forest this morning and last night, seemingly for no reason. The question of how the bone I’d found had come to be here.

  The number of disappearances in these woods over the years.

  “I’m going in,” I called back. “There’s enough room, I’ll just keep the rope on.”

  The screaming stopped as suddenly as it had started.

  I grabbed hold of the stonework around the opening and maneuvered my way inside.

  #

  “Do you hear anything now?” Ren whispered, her eyes wide.

  Bear listened. His ears were still ringing f
rom the scream that had woken him. “No,” he said. He looked toward the window again, searching for a sign of the girl in the sweater. There was nothing, though. They’d been here more than twenty-four hours, the sky now dark outside. He’d heard nothing from his mother. Nothing from anyone. On the bright side, he hadn’t bled to death yet.

  “So Mary isn’t back?” Ren asked. Mary: the girl in the red sweater. They’d taken to calling her that now.

  “No,” Bear said. “There’s nobody there now. Maybe I dreamed it.”

  She looked doubtful. Anyone else would be doubtful of all the bullshit about seeing dead people; hearing their screams. With Ren, it was the other way around. The second he started denying the things he saw and heard, that was when she got pissed off.

  “How do you feel?” she asked after a few seconds. He tried to move his arm and blanched at the pain, though he managed to keep it together enough not to yell. Or cry.

  “It hurts,” he said. “But I can handle it.”

  She frowned and scooted closer, her hands cool on his burning skin as she checked the bandages. “The bleeding has slowed, but it’s seeping a lot. We need to get you out of here, get you on antibiotics.”

  “Dean will let us go soon,” he said. He saw the doubt in her eyes, and heard it in his own voice. Why would Dean let them go? Just because he’d given his word? The old man was terrified. Heartsick. If Ariel was found the way Melanie had been, that would be the end of them both.

  “It’s night again,” Ren said, nodding toward the window. “You think they’ve found anything yet?”

  He thought again of the scream that had woken him. The girl in red, and whatever she’d been trying to tell him.

  “I’m pretty sure they’ve found something,” he said after a few seconds. “I just don’t know how much good it’ll do us.”

  #

  “How far in does it go?” I heard a voice behind me ask. I was on my hands and knees in the tunnel, inching along at a Basset’s pace. At the words, I turned and was blinded by a bright flashlight. Jack’s voice directly behind it.

  “I’m not sure,” I called back. “What are you doing down here?”

  “No way am I letting you in here alone,” he said. I heard him coming closer. “Since when do you get to have all the fun?”

  “If this is your idea of fun, remind me to never go on a date with you.”

  “I wasn’t actually asking. If I were, though, I’m sure I could come up with something a little more original than spelunking in a subterranean prison.”

  “Well, in that case…” I stopped, and checked myself. I was flirting. What the hell was I doing flirting, in a situation like this? I was the worst mother in the world. “Do you have any idea why they’d have something like this out here?” I asked, steering us back to business.

  “Not a clue. It looks like this whole system is hand dug, though, so it must have been done at the same time the well was made.”

  “I can’t imagine the work that must have gone into it. What was the point?” I thought of the scream I’d heard. The bone at the bottom of the well. The words written on the wall.

  “You know, they used to say that Glastenbury Mountain was cursed—that Native Americans wouldn’t even come up here, because there was something evil about the place,” Jack said.

  “Old wives’ tales,” I said. “There are a series of stone cairns at the top of the mountain pre-dating colonial times by several hundred, if not thousand, years. Those cairns follow a line all the way down to Nantucket, possibly one meant to mirror the path of the sun. If they took the time to lug mammoth stones up here to build something like that, they couldn’t have been that shy about spending time here.”

  There was a pause before Jack responded. “When did you have time to research that?”

  “Last night. Rita had already given us some info—at least the disappearances and the folklore associated with the mountain.”

  “But you don’t believe those? Despite…” He paused. “Well—you know.”

  “Despite whatever it is that goes on with me,” I said, aware of what he was implying, “in my experience most things have a logical explanation. I don’t know why or how Bear and I can see, hear, or experience what we do, but I think the reality of that is something scientists will one day figure out: a parallel universe or a link to past and present energies that we just don’t understand right now. That doesn’t mean I believe in alien abduction or the Loch Ness monster.”

  We’d been following the rough stonework long enough now that my knees were raw from the trek, my hands torn beneath my gloves. I stopped when I reached the end of my rope.

  “How much farther do you think it goes?” Jack asked.

  “No idea, but I mean to find out.” I unclipped the rope from my harness only to feel a hand on my ankle a second later.

  “What the hell are you doing? I thought you told me yesterday that you do what makes sense. McDonough’s already not happy with the fact that you’re down here, but you’ve got the SAR credentials that mean he’s willing to look the other way as long as I’m with you. Now you want to go even further? How does that make sense?”

  My heart was pounding so hard I was sure Jack could hear the beat echo off the walls around us. He was right. I hadn’t felt this out of control for years—in that time, I’d worked hard to become someone people took seriously. But there was that screaming in the back of my head; the memory of my little sister all those years ago, vanished without a trace. And, above all that, there was Bear.

  Waiting for me to save him.

  “I have to do this. Something’s down there,” I said. “This may lead to wherever Ariel is now—in fact, there’s a good bet it does. I’m not stopping until I figure out where it comes out. We’re running out of time.”

  “Let someone else do it,” Jack persisted. “Someone with the right equipment.”

  “I have all the equipment I need. This is the only thing I can do right now: find Ariel. I’m not stopping.”

  For all my fighting, the search didn’t last much longer. Ten minutes later, I found a small pile of crumbled rock in my path. I shone my light up ahead, and my heart sank.

  The tunnel was littered with rock and debris, the path virtually unpassable. Regardless, I continued on. Seconds later, I felt that familiar hand on my ankle. This time, however, there was no room for negotiation in Jack’s voice

  “Stop. We’re going back—we’ll get a team in here to make sure it’s safe. If you destabilize the tunnel, you could get us both killed. What good does that do Bear and Ren?”

  I stopped, still on hands and knees, breath coming faster. Through the rock, a hoarse cry rose, lifting the hair along the back of my neck. Jack tugged gently on my foot.

  “Come on, Jamie. I want you to talk to Gordon, anyway. Please.”

  Reluctantly, I maneuvered in the awkward space until I could turn around. The cry fell off to soft weeping that seemed to move with me; settled into my skin and bones. I kept moving.

  I’d gone no more than a couple of feet before I heard something behind me—the sound of someone’s breath, the slow drag of a body along the limestone. Instead of a scream this time, for the first time I heard a girl’s voice. Her words were unmistakable.

  Go faster.

  “Jack,” I said. I couldn’t hide the fear in my voice. He paused. “No—don’t stop. Faster. Go faster.”

  To his credit, Jack didn’t question me.

  Whatever was behind me had stopped moving. I heard something else, though—something far more terrifying. The sound of a match being struck. From the corner of my eye, I saw the flicker of the flame. Smelled the unmistakable sulfur dioxide.

  “Shit. Go, Jack. Go!”

  “What’s going on?” he called back.

  “Just move!”

  He went faster, me behind him crawling for all I was worth, suddenly cognizant of just how ineffective crawling actually is. I longed to get to my feet and run, but there was no room.

 
Something hissed behind me, the smell of the sulfur lingering. I knew an instant before it happened; heard the girl’s cry, her words of warning, the air getting heavier and the tunnel more oppressive in that single instant when everything hung in the balance.

  In the moment before the charge went off.

  There was a gust of hot air behind me powerful enough to push me forward, followed by a deafening roar.

  And then, the walls came tumbling down.

  * * *

  Chapter 18

  “HE LIKES US to live underground with him,” the girl said to me. She was pretty in a Gibson girl kind of way, with neat features, dark hair, and a red sweater frayed at the edges. She stood in front of me in a darkened cavern, her forehead furrowed and her eyes pensive.

  “Who does?” I asked. The air was warm, oppressive, like it was heated by the fires of hell itself. I didn’t want to be here.

  “The shadow man,” she said. “He came for us and brought us here. Wanted us to stay, but we tried to leave.”

  “You keep saying ‘us.’ Who’s us?”

  She looked around. For the first time, I noticed a dozen people—both men and women, young and old—watching us from the back of the cave. They huddled closer, all of them pale, unwashed. Many of them injured.

  “He left us here,” the girl said. “But now I’m supposed to get us out. Bring us home.”

  “You…” I stopped. “How long have you been here?”

  She glanced back at the others, then looked at me seriously. Her eyes seemed to glow in the darkness. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think, not long at all. And other times, I think maybe…” She swallowed hard, clearly frightened. When she spoke again, she’d lowered her voice so the others couldn’t hear us. “I think something has gone wrong. And I can’t tell what it is… I only know that the shadows locked us here for what felt like a long, long time. He was gone so long, we’d almost forgotten him.”

  “And now?” I said.

  “And now, someone’s here. Running. Hiding. And she brought the shadow man back.”

  There was a sound like breaking glass in the distance. The girl looked up, fear crossing her face. “I have to go. I have to keep us safe.”